Sham
by onehellofashot
Summary: What if it was all a dream?


I'm awake. I have a pulse. Machines are beeping. People are whispering. I survived. Everything hurts, it's like I haven't moved in a century. I can see Hayden, and she notices the hoarse groan that escapes from my throat.

"Ben?" she gasps. "Ben? Are you awake?"

She can't be here. What would Vivien say? Vivien. Oh God. Everything came rushing back at once; Vivien, our baby... dead. Gone. "Michael?" I groan.

She shot a worried glance at the nurse working on the machine next to me, and they thought I didn't notice the silent exchange between the two. "Ben, listen to me, do you know where you are?"

"Los Angeles, California. Where is Michael?"

Another concerned glance. "You're... not in California, Ben. You're in Boston."

"Why would I come back to Boston, Hayden? What are you doing here? Where is Michael?"

Her cheeks got red and she gently traced her fingers across my cheek, I wanted nothing more to pull away, but I couldn't make myself move. "You never left Boston... you've never even been to California."

She thought I wouldn't notice how she avoided my questions, the name Michael. Was she still trying to get money out of me? Making me think I lost my mind so she could live some sort of sick fantasy? "Stop bullshitting me," I growled. "What about Violet, huh? You want to tell me she's never been to California?"

The nurse became increasingly drawn into our conversation; looking into my eyes with a tiny flashlight, checking my pulse, even feeling for a fever. Hayden took hold of my hand, "I think... we need to straighten out a few things."

"I think you need to have some self-respect and get out."

She frowned, pulling her fingers away from my face, "Ben... do you know who I am?"

"Of course I know who you are!" I was beginning to panic, you could hear it in the beeps that were growing more frequent. "Hayden, you're going to stop this. You're going to tell me where my children are, and you are going to stay away."

"Ben," she sobbed. "Why are you s-"

The nurse grabbed her by the shoulder, "Hayden, let's let him wake up a little bit, it's likely that his memory is damaged, don't be worried." Hayden stood, giving a small whimper before leaving the nurse and I behind.

"Miss," I started.

"Please," she smiled. "Call me Haylee."

The girl was so young. She wouldn't understand... couldn't understand. This was serious, wasn't it? Hayden tried to kill my wife, my unborn children. Nobody remembered? I resisted the - useless - urge to smack the peppy smile from her face, and attempted to calm myself. Who were they more likely to believe? The innocent college girl crying over her ex-lover, or the crazy man with a bullet in his brain. I have to be rational. "Haylee, that girl is crazy, you have to get her out of here."

The girl sat down next to me, patting my arm gently, "Mr. Harmon, I think you're confused. You're expecting a baby with 'that girl'."

It hit me like a second bullet; traveling back to Boston for an abortion, leaving during the procedure. I didn't have the abortion. Yeah, I'm having the baby. Our baby. Her voice rang out in my ears, that smug look on her face as she sat in my office chair. You're paying child support. Nothing made sense. Larry killed her. But, he didn't. By the way, I had the abortion. "She was in LA with me, why did we come back here? How did you get me back here before I... died?"

"It was here," she said sympathetically. "Ms. McClaine... found you in your kitchen. You shot yourself."

As if I didn't know that. "Where is Michael?"

She sighed, the dopey smile now completely gone, and her grip on my hand tightened. "I shouldn't be telling you this, I really shouldn't, but you need to hear it. I'm sure this will all come back to you soon, but Vivien didn't make it through child birth... the babies were... lost as well."

"Michael? Jeffrey?" Another bullet. The sight of Vivien, dying in his office, the last little bit of light falling from her eyes. The sight of Vivien laying in a hospital bed, her life-line falling flat.

"I'm so sorry," she said, her face red.

"Where's Violet?"

Now the tears began to hard for her to hold back, "I can't tell you anymore, Dr. Harmon."

Now I forced my arm to move; it was sluggish and clumsy, but I grabbed her wrist. "Don't do that. Please, tell me."

"Just let me got get your doctor, you need to hear it from him."

My mind jumped to the worst, and my heart rate continued to escalate, but the doctor arrived quickly. "Mr. Harmon," he smiled. "Glad to see you're awake."

"Where is she?" I demanded. "Tell me now, where is Violet?"

He sighed, "You've been gone for a long time - almost as long as she's been gone."

I'm dead! Don't you get it?

I could feel the tears in my eyes, the bile in my throat. She couldn't be gone. Couldn't be dead. "She killed herself, didn't she?" The doctor didn't answer, wouldn't even look at me. My little girl. Gone.

"We're going to help you, Ben, you're going to make it through this. That baby needs you."

...

I've fallen so low. Ben Harmon - psychologist and father, now just another crazy in somebody else's office.

"Are you beginning to regain your memory?"

"Hayden has been helping me, but sometimes I get confused about what is real and what I dreamt."

"I want you to tell me about this 'dream' you had, Ben. You know it is almost unheard of for a comatose patient to dream at all, let alone remember it with that amount of detail."

I nodded, of course I knew that. "Vivien... had a miscarriage - we lost our son."

She wasn't looking at me, but gently nodding and taking notes, "Only one baby."

"I... cheated on her with Hayden." My stomach rolled at the name and I put my hands over my face. "She caught me."

"Can you tell me when your real-life affair with Hayden began?"

"A few weeks after Vivien's death." I hadn't even waited until she was cold in her grave.

"Are you staying with her?"

"She's been taking care of me, yes."

"Go on," she smiled.

"I convinced her to stay with me... we decided to move, to start over."

"In California?"

"I found a house there, so we packed up and left. Violet... wasn't happy about it, but we thought that a change of scenery would be good for her. She was alway so sad."

"Was it that way outside of the dream as well?"

I didn't want to think about it I just wanted to die. Thinking of my beautiful little girl put my stomach in knots. "Yes, she was bullied... antisocial. I don't know why I didn't see it coming."

She pushed the tissues closer to me, adding to my agitation. "It's okay, keep going."

"Things were still rocky between me and Vivien; she wasn't willing to completely forgive me. I didn't give up, I couldn't. The more she pushed away, the tighter I held on, and it finally started working. She was going to have a baby."

I think I want Indian food.

"What about little details? Were you working?"

"I saw patients in the house." I explained everything to her, giving every tiny detail; Addy showing up without warning, Tate's relationship with Violet, Hayden's pregnancy, the rape. "Vivien died giving birth to the babies, and the baby that was mine died too. Michael lived, but I didn't want to deal with it, so I was going to kill myself, but... Vivien and Violet came back. They gave me the last bit of courage I needed to leave with Michael, but I didn't make it, Hayden hung me off from the second floor balcony, I died."

"Is that when you woke up?"

"No. There was a reason Violet and Vivien were able to come back to me: they were ghosts... and because I died there too, so was I."

She looked almost overwhelmed by the time I was done, already ten minutes over my session time. "Well, this was a productive session. I'll see you on Wednesday, but until then, I want you to think about how this resonates with your real life. You need to face the problems head on."

...

Hayden sat criss-cross on the bed in front of me, unwrapping the gauze from around my head. "Your hair is coming back in," she smiled. I realized that the only Hayden I really knew was the one from my dreams, an evil and immature little girl, and I was trying to give this one a chance. She was still so young, still holding some of the girlish tendencies he had seen in his dreams, but no signs of a murderer yet. "Your therapist tells me that I was in this dream you had."

"Yes."

She rubbed a cleaning solution over my wound, muttering quiet apologies when I winced. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want."

"I don't think you'd like it."

She nodded, "I ordered Chinese... maybe we could watch a movie, talk?"

"About what?"

"Anything you want, Ben. Questions, what's real and what's not, us, the baby, the stock market... anything you want."

I smiled, "The stock market?"

"Anything."

"How did it happen? Us, how did we happen?"

"Don't pretend you don't remember me flirting with you... I had a crush on you since the first day I met you."

"You knew I was married, though."

"I was crushed when I found out," she said, wrapping fresh gauze around by head. "Not surprised, but crushed. You stopped coming to class for a week... and I found out about what happened. I brought flowers by the house, but nobody answered the door." She pointed to a vase of dead roses on her dresser, "When you came back, you looked like you were doing really well."

"I was?"

"After class, I came to ask how you were doing, and you just asked me out to drinks... out of nowhere. I almost died right there on the spot."

Everything Hayden was saying didn't make any sense: I was ready to ask a random student to drinks only a week after Vivien's death? Hayden curled up next to me in bed, quickly falling asleep, but my head throbbed at the clashing thoughts. Sleep was tugging at my eyelids, but I didn't want Hayden in my bed with me. I gently slipped away from her, taking a blanket with me, and settling down on the couch downstairs. I stared down the hallway that led to Violet's room, I hadn't stepped foot in that room since my return home, but the door stood slightly open: like an invitation.

Paralysis set in and I realized I wasn't going to revisit my little girl tonight, instead I closed my eyes and fell into the darkness.

Sleep took me to a park I had spent of fair amount of time in as a child; the sky was gray and a few microscopic drops of moisture hit my face every few seconds. There wasn't really any desire to get up from my spot on a park bench, no curiosity that drove me to find out why I was there. Something told me that whatever I was looking for would come to me. I enjoyed the view, the green contrasting with the sky and the sound of tires flying smoothly over the pavement behind me. Occasionally, someone would pass me by: a chattering couple, a jogger, an older woman with a dog, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

I was so caught up in my surroundings, I hadn't noticed the figure that sat next to me. I turned to examine my neighbor, immediately recognizing her: Vivien. She looked so young, so happy, staring back at me with a content smile on her face. I wouldn't say that I was excited to see her, it didn't feel like I was getting her back, it didn't feel like she had been dead. If felt like she was never gone, and I slid my arm around her.

"I hear you're crazy now," she smiled.

"Ironic, huh?"

"What happened, Ben?"

I put my face in my hands, reality sinking in. "All of it was fake... none of it happened. You and Violet... and the babies had already left me behind." She didn't say anything, forcing me to continue. "I was holding on to you while I could."

"You shot yourself."

"Yes."

"Shooting yourself isn't going to bring us back."

"I just want to be with you."

"We're gone, we're not coming back."

"I know I can't bring you back."

She kissed me softly, and just as I was about to ask about Violet, she stood to go. "Cope how you want, Ben, but don't kill yourself. That baby needs you."

I ducked my head, guilty that she knew about Hayden. "You'll come see me, right?"

"I told you, I'm gone. I can't come back."

"I need you."

She was already gone, leaving me alone, the park bench fading into my couch and the grass turning to carpet. I had to stay. I had to take care of Hayden like she had taken care of me. My baby needs me.

AN: Not sure if I'll be doing a second part or not, but I hope you like it!


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